Listen with your eyes!

Alternative

I grew up listening to a lot of alternative rock music — a good handful of hip-hop but nothing in-depth. Most of my musical influence came from Nine Inch Nails and the “industrial uprising.” My parents met at a Ministry concert at the first actual venue I ended up playing at, in the closest city’s bar scene. My dad got me into every good popular metal, hardcore, punk, rock band I can think to listen to today, besides newer bands of this generation.

As a young boy, I went to music school to learn to play the piano. That knowledge helped me to learn how to play the guitar and drums. I listen to a wide range of music genres. After twenty years of playing in hardcore and metal bands, I started with the project Wake Forld because I wanted to unite my favorite music styles.

J. Moriarty, an American artist living in Morocco, released his EP titled Baraka in the fall of 2018. The minimalist project rotates around the sound of a dulcimer guitar that he found abandoned in the corner of his apartment building called, logically, “Baraka.”

In the first grade, I carried history books around like spell books. There was this magic about language that I felt compelled to keep close, like it had secret powers that I didn’t have access to yet. Clinging to an impressive-looking pile of books every day at school was also how I prevented my classmates from realizing I couldn’t read.

When the daily grind seems without purpose creating music is my way out. This was of course not by intent or design. I guess what drove me into making music as a solo-project (from playing bass in bands since I was 14 or 15 years old) was mostly curiosity. Could I record at home? How does it work and what can I do?

I began with a classical training from age eight on violins made by my grandfather, from a half size to three quarter, then to his “number 2” with a finessed fiddleback grain in high glaze. His Luthier’s hands I remember as large and gnarly as they would trace the creases of my palm to elucidate future prospects. After ten years of scales and arpeggios working my way through graded texts filled with compositions by the gifted and deceased, a final concert in the embers of 1990 marked the occasion of my last musical performance on stage, aside from dreams.

Barely 12 months passed before my own strange sounds were committed to cassette tape for the first time, born of a natural necessity to do, and it was this background of prescribed exam pieces that gave me something to react against.